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2016 institute
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Grammatical gender and word order in bilingual acquisition and attrition
by Marit Westergaard (UiT The Arctic University of Norway & Norwegian University of Science and Technology)In this session, I will present bilingual data from two populations of bilinguals; Norwegian-American heritage speakers in the USA and Norwegian-Russian heri¬tage speakers in Norway. In both cases, a comparison is made between child and adult bilinguals. The data focus on two linguistic phenomena, grammatical gender (in Russian and Norwegian) and word order (in Norwegian vs. English). The discussion will focus on factors such as amount of exposure (in childhood and adulthood) as well as linguistic variation and complexity. Generally, I will argue that, while complexity is the most important factor in acquisition, fre¬quency is more important in adulthood, protecting against language attrition.